How One Company’s Turnaround Came From the Heart

In his inspiring and instructive book Rules of Thumb, my friend and Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber identifies two questions that demand the attention of leaders. The first is familiar: What keeps you up at night? What are the worries that nag at you? The second is less familiar, but perhaps more important: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you more committed than ever, more engaged than ever, more excited than ever, as the environment around you gets tougher and more demanding than ever?

That’s a question organizations need to take seriously if they hope to prosper during this period of crisis and (slow) recovery. Even the most hard-charging leaders recognize that success today is not just about thinking differently from other companies. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, about caring more than other companies — about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with endless temptations to cut corners and compromise on values.

One of the companies I’ve studied for my next book, Practically Radical, is called DaVita. Talk about a tough business — it provides about one-third of all of the kidney-dialysis treatments in the United States. Back in 1999, when CEO Kent Thiry took charge, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. It had revenues of $1.4 billion, losses of $56 million, and a share price of about $2. Less than ten years later, it had revenues of $5.7 billion, net income of $374 million, and a share price approaching $60. It is one of the great business turnarounds I’ve seen in a long time — from a market capitalization of $200 million in 1999 to more than $6 billion today.

What’s important, though, is that Thiry turned around the company by turning around the culture. One of the first messages he sent to worried employees was: “We are going to flip the ends and means of this business. We are a community first and a company second.” Translation: If the people of DaVita could figure out how to treat patients right, and how to treat each other right, then the business would right itself. And that’s precisely what happened.

Life at DaVita is filled with symbols, rituals, and traditions that bear little resemblance to life inside conventional organizations. When Thiry took over, the company was called Total Renal Care, not exactly the warmest identity. After generating a bunch of alternative names, the company put the final choices up to a vote of 800 members of the workforce, chosen to express the will of their colleagues in a form of representative democracy. (Two-thirds of the 800-person electoral college were nurses.) The name DaVita, (inspired, it is said, by an Italian phrase that means “he or she who gives life”) won in a landslide. (The winning name was unveiled at a rally that felt like an election-night celebration.) There’s an official company song (“On DaVita,” to the tune of “On Wisconsin“), which employees sing with great relish. At the DaVita offices in El Segundo, California, there’s a wooden footbridge across which thousands of employees have walked to signify their passage into a new way of working. The wildly spirited Nationwide Meeting, in which thousands of employees celebrate awards, mourn the death of patients, and connect with the emotional side of their work, is truly something to behold.

Why do Thiry and his colleagues bother with such outsized gestures? Because the demands on the workforce are so relentless. Each dialysis treatment is four hours long, patients get three treatments a week, 52 weeks a year, and you know that eventually your patients will die unless they are lucky enough to get a kidney transplant. The company’s 35,500 employees care for more than 116,000 patients, which means they provide more than 16 million treatments per year. That’s 16 million opportunities to overlook a symptom, misdiagnose a problem, or otherwise make a small mistake that could have deadly consequences. It’s hard to make a purely business case for people to care as much as they need to care in order to deliver great service. You have to be motivated by something deeper — a sense of commitment not just to patients, but also to one another.

There’s a wonderful biography of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Washington Post. After the Green Bay Packers captured the first-ever Super Bowl, Maraniss writes, Coach Lombardi, as tough an SOB as there was on the American sporting scene, found himself in high demand as a speaker to executive audiences, who wanted him to translate his principles for victory on the gridiron to success in work and life. In what became a recurring message to corporate America, he set out seven principles of competition and leadership, most of which you’d expect from the greatest football coach of all time. But his most important principle was also the most surprising: Love is more powerful than hate.

“The love I’m speaking of is loyalty, which is the greatest of loves,” Lombardi told his audiences. “Teamwork, the love that one man has for another and that he respects the dignity of another…I am not speaking of detraction. You show me a man who belittles another and I will show you a man who is not a leader…Heart power is the strength of your company. Heart power is the strength of the Green Bay Packers. Heart power is the strength of America and hate power is the weakness of the world.”

That spirit of tough love explains why DaVita works the way it does. At this company — as at all companies — the make-or-break issue isn’t just what separates you from the competition in the marketplace. It’s what holds you together in the workplace. Organizations built around unique strategies are at their best when rank-and-file colleagues share and express genuine emotions. That’s the new question facing leaders in all kinds of industries: Even as you provide colleagues with a sound playbook for the business to compete, have you given them strong enough reasons to care — about customers, about colleagues, about doing what’s right in an environment in which so much can go wrong?